


Softer Days Ahead

by howsharry



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Coping, Fresh Start, M/M, New Relationship, Parentlock, after s4, bit of angst, but definitely comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 03:14:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9529343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howsharry/pseuds/howsharry
Summary: The days after everything are much softer than Sherlock ever imagined his life to be.A fluffy, thoughtful WIP without much plot yet





	

The days after everything are much softer than Sherlock ever imagined his life to be. The light that fades through his bedroom window is pleasantly pastel, the sounds of the kettle and the clinkering of cups is wonderfully subtle, the bed is warm and welcoming. It’s the first day he wakes up and feels refreshed, energized. Nothing in his dreams to suck away his energy or darken his mood or trigger off revolving thoughts. 

Sherlock jawns, stretches out beneath the bed sheets and drives a hand through his curls, pulling them back. Even the strain of his hair feels good, empowering somehow. He may need a haircut.

He staggers out of bed, his brain still a bit fuzzy with his awakening, winds the sheet around his body and leaves his room. 

The sounds from the kitchen get louder, the kettle boiling more furiously, bread plopping up from the toaster. He sticks his head around the corner and his heart blooms up, almost making its way out of his chest, when he sees John preparing a tray of food and tea. He’s fully dressed, ready to start the day.

John senses him right away and looks up from his hands, right into Sherlock’s eye and the doctor immediately begins searching for something that isn’t right. It is usually early in the morning when Sherlock is kind of paralysed, when his brain hasn’t put up the daily guard yet and he feels so vulnerable and broken he snaps for the most trivial reasons. Cold tea, a spoon falling to the tiled floor, the light being too bright. At night there are different signs for him not coping, but right now John searches for his furrowed brow, his tense posture, the lines under his eyes - Sherlock knows them from his daily self-inspection in the mirror.

The lines on Johns face ease as he finds close to none of those signs, and after his surprise has slowly turned into happiness Sherlock can’t help but smile at him.

“Good morning”, John croaks. His voice is wonderfully raspy so soon in the day.

Sherlock says nothing in return, instead he slips past the corner and positions himself behind John’s back, wraps his arms and the sheet around him so they are both caged in a cocoon that smells of endorphine and men’s deodorant. 

“You look good today”, John remarks. Sherlock smiles to himself and puts his forehead against John’s neck.

“That’s not nearly as nice as it sounded in your head”, he chuckled, well knowing that it is a truth nonetheless. John never lies, not even in his own mind.

He feels the man slowly, hesitatingly turning underneath him. John’s breath on his cheek just before he plants a small kiss on Sherlock’s temple. The feeling of his lips makes Sherlock dizzy, he’s not used to this, maybe will never be. John being so soft with him, so lovingly.

Sherlock takes a deep breath and hold John closer to his chest, considers firstly if John can feel his heart beat through the layers of clothing and secondly that it doesn’t matter at all.

“Did you sleep well?”, John whispers, just loud enough, just right for their intimate situation.

Sherlock blinks down at him. “No dreams I can remember, stable REM-phases I guess.”

“You had four, I took your pulse”, John mutters and Sherlock purses his lips and holds him tight again. Brave, beautiful John who wakes up in the middle of the night without reason and has dark circles under his eyes. John who dreams of water and guns, of drowning. 

The kettle goes off and John turns away to finish his breakfast tray while Sherlock moves to the living room and - after brief consideration - settles down on the sofa instead of his chair because that’s where Rosie’s makeshift nursery is right now. She’s sleeping soundly, has probably just been fed by her father. 

Sherlock watches her from above. Utterly useless and utterly fascinating, barely able to hold onto her rattle for more than thirty seconds but more capable of expressing her emotions with barely one year than Sherlock has the last twenty-five. Secretly, he thinks of her as the further evolved one.

“You should wake me”, Sherlock says as John puts the tray down on the coffee table, eyes still hefted to the toddler.

“Mh?”

“You should wake me in the morning, so I can help you with all of this.” He looks up to John who’s still standing, frowning at Sherlock and his child. Sherlock gestures around the table and the crib.

“With Rosie?”

“Whatever you like. You’re awake earlier, so you should wake me.”

John blinks, processing, and then smiles silently to himself while he sits down.

“Yeah, sounds good. If you feel- , yeah, good.” John smiles back at him.

 

Just as Sherlock is short about to shoot Anderson with the tranquillizer gun (bad idea: valuable evidence on the crime scene), John arrives slightly out of breath and with baby powder on his cuffs. Hurried to get Rosie to Mrs. Hudson then.

“There you are”, Sherlock mutters and turns his attention back to the dead body. Behind him John pulls on some latex gloves and exchanges a smirk with Lestrade.

“Traffic is a mess”, me murmurs back and presses a quick kiss to Sherlock’s cheek as he crouches down, too, and starts to examine the body.

Unprofessional, Sherlock thinks, the dizziness kicking in again. He feels hot, can feel Donovan and Lestrade looking at them, possibly smiling smugly. He blinks, tries to concentrate again on John’s words.

“...female, between 26 and 28 I’d guess, healthy weight, bad teeth, though...”

“Smoker, recently made up with her ex - see the lip stick smudges on her neck, no happy relationship, though, her nails are far to bitten for that, cuts her hair herself, financial insecuritie then”, Sherlock joins in with his deductions. “More about the cause of death, please.”

“Blown pupils, bloodshot eyes”, John comments and starts to slide the sleeve of on of the victims arms up. Drug overdose, of course, Sherlock thinks bitterly, his heart beginning to flutter. 

“No punctures on her arms.”

“Could be on the groin...”

“Yeah, but I won’t be examining that area here, Sherlock. She could have swallowed something, maybe”, John huffs out and turns back to her face. “Rash behind her ears and down the neck.”

Sherlock shakes his head. “Unimportant, caused by the cheap jewellery.”

Lestrade steps forwards and holds out a plastic bag with a few newspaper sheets inside, all smeared with blood. “Must be from her attacker”, he said, “there are signs of a fight on the staircase, more blood which is definitely not hers.”

Anderson chimes in. “There’s blood under her fingernails.”

Sherlock closes his eyes. Even John’s presence can’t keep him from snapping anymore. “Lestrade, please banish this absolute moron from my crime scene.”

“Hey!”, John and Lestrade go off at the same time, warningly. “Keep calm”, John murmurs. 

“I just said there’s blood under her fingernails”, Anderson defended himself. 

Sherlock rose from his crouch and took a deep breath. “I presume you did not walk into this building with a blindfold on so I can either assume you are a complete idiot for not realizing that the amount of blood can hardly be drawn by down-bitten fingernails or the fact that you didn’t find a murder weapon within comfortable walking distance of the crime scene made you choose the closest but least probable course of things. Attacker lured drugged victim into an old warehouse with the intend to harm her severely, doesn’t reckon she may still fight back, gets injured but succeeds in killing his victim. Well, the victim dies of an OD.”

The room is quiet all of the sudden and Sherlock remembers the feeling of this. Lightning-bolt fast deductions, a room full of idiots worshipping him for his brain, his own arrogance jumping right out of him, John being impressed. 

At last, Lestrade coughs and smacks his lips. “So that’s not what’s happened.”

“Obviously not.”

“Care to tell us what happened then?”, John asks from beneath and Sherlock looks at his everlasting mediator to the world of normals. He smiles, smiles at Sherlock with a happiness Sherlock has missed on John’s face for a long time and that now - moment by moment - seems to restore itself.

“Of course”, Sherlock mutters and crouches down next to the body again. Time to work. 

“She doesn’t have any form of bruising from a fight, that’s odd”, John remarks. Clever boy, Sherlock thinks, gazing over the woman.

“There has been a fight, but she hasn’t been the victim of it, she was the aggressor, the perpetrator. I guess she took some pills, went to a night club-”, he pulled out his phone and searched the area. “There are some of them in walking distance, her shoes look clean though so they probably took a cab.”

“They.”

“They, Anderson, what else.”

“She and the victim which has fled the crime scene”, John added. “Severely hurt.”

“I cannot guess with which intentions our attacker has brought her victim here, but they are improbable to have been friendly”, Sherlock continued. “They fought, she took a metal hook or something similar lying around here and struck, injuring her victim. The drugs she took kicked in, an overdose, the grabbed the other person, fell, kept lying there alone.”

“Reminds you of someone?”, Anderson murmured before he turned to leave. 

Before Sherlock could as much as swallow bitterly John had jumped on his feet and pressed the taller man to the nearest wall, elbow pressed into his adam’s apple. “Don’t you dare”, John breathed. 

“Stop it, John”, Lestrade intervened and pulled him off, John, furious and restless, and Anderson nearly shitting his pants and panting rapidly. Sherlock just stood there, dumbstruck, looking at John mesmerized. 

“Sorry”, John muttered and scratched his head. “I- It’s been a while since...”

Lestrade swallowed and took a deep breath, went back to business. “Where can we find the victim?”

“Victim is female, probably about 170cm but quite strong, athletic. Hospital, whichever nearest, emergency room”, Sherlock said, voice flat. Lestrade nodded and pulled out his phone, following Anderson outside. 

Sherlock and John were left, with the body of course, and Sherlock blinked at few times before he found the will to open his mouth.

“You don’t have to do that”, he said. “You don’t have to defend me.”

John wiped his hands across his face and finally through his greying hair. He was beautiful, despite his eye bags, despite looking very broken right now. “That wasn’t for you”, he answered. “I can’t stand the thought - it’s been not that long since...”

Sherlock moved and came to stand next to John, looking out to the police officers and cars fuzzing around, orders being shouted, the red light of the ambulance.

“You have a special way of making everyone know I belong to you”, he said lowly, “but maybe at least it will have long-lasting effects on Anderson’s behaviour.”

John chuckled, finally, and allowed himself to lean into Sherlock who wrapped his arm around John’s shoulder. “I scared the shit out of him, right?”

“What a brilliant feeling that must have been”, Sherlock mustered.

“Mh”, John answered, “very satisfying.”

 

Times are soft and golden stretches of domestic bliss with John and Rosie, tea with the godparents, occasionally tea with Sherlock’s parents, all of which is regularly disturbed by a quick trip to Mrs. Hudson or Molly to go on criminal hunt sans toddler. It is - Sherlock thinks - those times when John is the happiest. Obviously he is pumped with adrenaline and endorphins, but he’s also glowing so prettily in the light of street lamps or the moon reflected on the river. It is those times Sherlock thinks when John is most amazed by him, times that remind him of their earlier years when the light was a bit harder, more aggressive, but everything was also less serious. A game, really, not yet the war it would become.

When Sherlock sits on the couch with Rosie in his arms he feels very distant from then, so responsible, not only for his own life but also that of a hand full of people he loves. They made a home, they are in the process of making peace with themselves. 

Sherlock can’t allow himself to hunt criminals four nights a week and lie in bed for the rest. It is tightly planned, the times when he has to function are no longer defined by the stimulus his brain receives. There are of course days when they lay low, when John won’t sleep at all and Sherlock goes bonkers because of that or because of his very own reasons. 

He feels that he has changed over the years in many ways, but his personality, his eccentric, manic and often times dramatic self did not and he often thinks that it must bother John, that his annoyance will someday overwhelm the fondness he feels for Sherlock. 

And in other ways he wonders if him growing up will someday be to much of a stretch from the men John was amazed by in the beginning. There is action and murder, but not as much as it used to be, there is less chaos, less drugs, less general danger. Less of things that attracted John to him since their first case. Sherlock doesn’t think that he values his own life much more now himself, but it definitely has some importance to John and his friends and he knows he would never make them grief again if it lies in his power to prevent that. 

It is one night, when they are lying still next to each other in bed, as if they were two killed lovers on a crime scene, that Sherlock feels daring enough, feels secure enough to bring the topic to light and once he does and realized he could only tell John because he knows John likes him nonetheless that the whole thing becomes...

“It’s pathetic, I know”, Sherlock mutters, his hand lying motionless intertwined with John’s on top of the covers.

John mouth quirks unhappily. It’s not, he says without saying.

Eventually John breathes out deeply. “I make you feel loved, don’t I?” His voice is a bit shaky and Sherlock feels irritated by the question.

“Of course.”

“Then stop worrying about such things.”

It is simple. Sherlock knows nobody with more simple truths at hand than John, a man with practical advice who knows himself that truth itself can never be simple and rarely beautiful. John, a conductor of not only light but reassurance. 

“You stop worrying”, Sherlock shot back. “Your crease is back again.”

“It’s not”, John huffed, the crease on his forehead deepening. 

“It is, love.”

“Shut up and sleep then”, John chuckles and presses closer to Sherlock, leaving no room for this conversation to deepen tonight.


End file.
